Bio

Tepperman has spent close to twenty years working on international affairs as an editor, writer, and analyst. He started his career in foreign policy working as a speechwriter at the UN in Geneva, Switzerland, in 1994. After stints as a reporter at the Forward and the Jerusalem Post, he joined Foreign Affairs in 1998 as a junior editor. He later moved to Newsweek International, where he was deputy editor (under Fareed Zakaria), and then worked as a political risk consultant before returning to Foreign Affairs in January 2011.

Tepperman has written for a range of publications, including Foreign Affairs, the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, the Atlantic, the New Republic, and others, on subjects ranging from international affairs to municipal politics to food and fashion. Tepperman has interviewed more than a dozen world leaders, including Syria’s Bashar al-Assad, Japan’s Shinzo Abe, Brazil’s Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, Mexico’s Enrique Peña Nieto, Indonesia’s Joko Widodo, and Rwanda’s Paul Kagame. He is the coeditor of the books The U.S. vs. al Qaeda (2011), Iran and the Bomb (2012), and The Clash of Ideas (2012).

Tepperman has a BA in English from Yale, an MA in law from Oxford, and an LLM in law from New York University. He is vice chairman of the Halifax International Security Forum, a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, and a fellow of the New York Institute of Humanities. He lives in Brooklyn with his family.

In recent weeks, Western governments have begun subtly shifting their positions on Syria. The Obama administration seems to have quietly dropped its demand that President Bashar al-Assad resign as a precondition of peace talks. Instead, reports suggest it has embraced proposals that would allow Assad to be part of an interim deal. The new approach implies that the White House and its allies believe that the Syrian president might be open to a compromise that could end his country’s four-year civil war.

Jonathan Tepperman examines six of the last major U.S. military operations—the Gulf War, Haiti, Kosovo, Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya, and "highlights a few basic principles that should give the Obama administration confidence to forge ahead on Syria today."

"Whether out of reticence, ambivalence, tactical calculation or the difficulty of making policy in Washington, the [Obama] administration's response to the human rights violators it has faced in five years in office has been mealy-mouthed and confusing," writes Jonathan Tepperman.

Japan's prime minister speaks openly about the mistakes he made in his first term, Abenomics, Japan's wartime record (and his own controversial statements on that history), and the bitter Senkaku/Diaoyu Island dispute with China.

China's new ambassador to the United States (and a rising star in Beijing) sets out his vision for U.S.-Chinese relations, discusses whether China is a revisionist power, and how it plans to deal with cyber security -- and Japan.

The conventional wisdom has it that second-term presidents, freed from the need to win another election, tend to be bolder in their initiatives. While that logic may apply to President Obama's domestic policy, it is unlikely to extend abroad.

A recent gaffe by Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe exposes the tense relations between Japan, China, and South Korea, and "helps explain why the region seems on the brink of not one by several conflicts," says Jonathan Tepperman.

If there's one indisputable fact about this most polarizing of figures, it's that he is hard to get rid of -- and every retreat, even his most recent withdrawal from political life, lays the groundwork for an eventual counterattack.

Jonathan Tepperman says a decision by the United States to intervene militarily in Syria must be made with hard facts and an honest decision about what standing up for U.S. interests and values will entail.

The Future of Special Operations

Views from the Newsroom: Challenges to American Power

SpeakersDavid E. SangerChief Washington Correspondent, New York Times; Author, Confront and Conceal: Obama's Secret Wars and Surprising Use of American Power, Daniel KlaidmanSpecial Correspondent, Newsweek; Author, Kill or Capture: The War on Terror and the Soul of the Obama PresidencyPresiderJonathan TeppermanManaging Editor, Foreign Affairs